[systemshacker]

This article is a recounting of public story. The real truth is much more nuanced with enough internal reasons (AMD veteran here).

AMD made a lot of profits with the x86-64 (Opteron family) around 2004-2005. However, that got to managements head and there were a series of missteps:

* Inorganic growth: The company went from small teams with startup culture to larger teams with many projects. AMD went and acquired large teams from HP in Fort Collins and Sun in Boston (Millenium chip team) in one fell swoop. This slowed projects a lot while assimilating and learning to work together with very different cultures and methodologies.

* Mid-management from IBM: Since the company was growing larger, a bunch of VPs from IBM were hired. They tried to bring IBM style processes which will not work when you do not have a captive market like IBM and your competitor is Intel :)

* Too many projects: The people and management growth resulted in everyone wanting their own chip project instead of working on derivatives of existing projects. There were too many projects conceived, spent cycles on and then cancelled.

* Paid too much for ATI: Bought them for 5.4 billion in 2006 when they could have waited till 2008 and bought them for 1 billion :) They had to write off most of the ATI value off their books and took charge for it.

[hga]

Yeah, I skimmed it and it looks mostly wrong, and you explain the outside observables:

AMD created an utterly dominating lead in server space in 2004-5, continuing the P6 microarchitecture approach while the Intel NetBurst (Pentium 4) microarchitecture failed when it coincided with the end of Dennard scaling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling it might have worked if they'd been able to make the 5-10 GHz parts on the roadmap).

Plus the per chip on chip local memory controllers and Hypertransport ccNUMA approach scaled much, much better than Intel's one front side bus (all CPUs hitting the same northbridge memory controller).

Then, from the outside, AMD just sat on its laurels, giving Intel enough time to get their act together from all their self-inflicted wounds and take advantage of their process lead. The K10 microarchitecture was late, and shipments had to be paused due to a nasty TLB bug which didn't help their credibility. Intel's QPI copy of the Hypertransport ccNUMA concept shipping a year, year and half later was probably the final nail in the coffin.

[yuhong]

I think it took until Bulldozer before they finally give up though, and part of the reason for that was FB-DIMM problems and DDR3 at first being more expensive. (Side note: it is unfortunate they didn't bother with 2Gbit DDR3 back in 2007 when Samsung and Elpida at least had prototypes of 2Gbit DDR2 back in 2006)

[qb45]

> Paid too much for ATI: Bought them for 5.4 billion in 2006 when they could have waited till 2008 and bought them for 1 billion :) They had to write off most of the ATI value off their books and took charge for it.

But was it really that predictable back in 2006?

2008 sounds like the year when Intel killed 3rd party chipset market. Which, afaik, wasn't expected by anyone.

[FreakyT]

Ah, that was the year that happened? I still remember the dark ages of having to pick between one of several chipset manufacturers, each with their own sets of strange problems.

Really, I think moving to chipsets made by the CPU manufacturer was an overall improvement.

[qb45]

A part of those chip's appeal was integrated GPUs. Not everyone wanted to buy discrete GPUs and Intel's own IGPs of early '00s were rather poor.

[amiraliakbari]

> Intel killed 3rd party chipset market

Can you explain on this? By producing chipsets itself/any specific product?

[sspiff]

They stopped licensing the interfaces used to connect to the different parts together (north bridge <-> south bridge and north bridge <-> CPU) starting with Nehalem (first generation of Core i[N] processors).

This effectively meant that if you wanted to build a mainboard for Intel CPU's, you had to buy the chipsets from Intel as well.

Before that, you could buy mainboards with ATI (Xpress), nVidia (nForce), or VIA chipsets. All of these could integrate different SATA contollers, audio chips, USB busses, etc.

By not licensing their interfaces, Intel basically took over almost all of that market by locking others out of it. I believe they could only do this because they had no real competition from AMD anymore in the CPU market.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

AMD did make various mistakes, it's true. But they certainly weren't helped by Intel's anti-competitive practices.

[scholia]

All when Hector Ruiz was running the company?